DIGESPEDI: Digital Genres in Specialised Discourses

Research we are currently engaged in:

• Practices of knowledge recontextualisation (Krystyna Warchał) – This research examines how knowledge is communicated to diverse audiences beyond academia. It explores who is involved in this process, how scientific content is adapted to the needs and interests of new audiences, and how accuracy, credibility, and audience engagement are maintained. It comprises the following themes:
  • Knowledge mediation across diverse audiences, with a particular focus on how original scientific knowledge claims are modified when they are communicated online outside the academic community, how the credibility of recontextualised information is established, and how it can be verified by new audiences. The way of presenting new knowledge to broad audiences influences public understanding of the findings, shapes attitudes towards science and evidence, and supports conscious, informed decision-making in everyday life and in relation to the environment.
  • Strategies of parallel entextualisation of research findings, understood as the simultaneous dissemination of new scientific results to different audiences by researchers and other actors involved in the research process. Findings announced simultaneously across different media and genres reach a maximally broadened audience and build audience trust by providing first-hand information rather than third-party reporting. Beyond balancing accessibility, accuracy, and relevance, such practices reflect civic responsibility and respect for stakeholders and the broad public.
  • The role of multimodality in public communication of knowledge, with a special focus on user-generated (as opposed to professionally produced) science-related videos shared online. This strand explores how digital content creators attract and sustain audience interest in a highly competitive media environment. Particular attention is paid to how creators employ multimodal resources to convey sincerity and authenticity when constructing their digital presence, without compromising their privacy. Viewers’ comments suggest that these aspects of communication may be especially valued by audiences in the age of generative AI.
• Effective online communication with open source software volunteers (Agnieszka Ziora and Dominik Gęgotek) – The research focuses on linguistic aspects and their influence on continuous cooperation with volunteers contributing to open source software projects on the GitHub platform. The study comprises several aspects, such as:
  • Creation of a corpus consisting of around 5 billion words, which includes discussions conducted between project coordinators and volunteers in open-source projects published under Apache and GPLv3 licenses on the GitHub platform in the years 2008-2025. It will not only contain raw language data but also provide information such as full context of a given discussion/message, exact dates, list of users, information about projects, codes of conducts, and README files.
  • Creation of a computational linguistic analysis program operating on the previously compiled corpus. The program will not only allow for basic searches in the corpus but also for context-related queries. After its creation, it will be made available under open source public license.
  • Analysis of sentiment and values. Those themes are researched by Agnieszka Ziora in her PhD thesis. This particular substudy will analyse how the sentiment of an utterance might influence further cooperation with a given volunteer, whether more positive critique will result in a longer cooperation, and how the community values are expressed in the discussions.
  • Analysis of hedge phrases and boosters. This broad topic is currently studied by Dominik Gęgotek. This substudy aims to find whether comments marked with a higher directness of speech are more likely to cause a failure in communication and how hedging expressions influence the clarity of communication.
  • Triangulation of the substudies with at least 1000 surveys conducted among open-source projects volunteers and interviews with project coordinators. Additionally, an interview with the initiator of the free software movement – dr h.c. Richard Stallman – was already conducted.